Nothing wrong with a big ego, is there? Self-promotion is still okay in the world? We're still free to toot our own horn? Write our own resumes, pitch our own products, spin our own political ideas, sell our own worldviews?
And what, exactly, does Godel have to do with any of that? I take it the idea is that Godel was the real genius?
If we're going to be measuring who's really smart, maybe we'd want to wait a few hundred years.
I admire people with big egos and positive attitudes. We could use more of them in the world. I don't buy into their self-image, but I admire it. Positive mental attitude -- the idea that you're capable of making something really big -- is what's going to keep you hacking on that startup long after others would have quit. Arrogance, on the other hand, is a different matter. But this post had nothing to say about arrogance.
Just wondering how it got so many upvotes. I guess Wolfram must have a natural ability to tick people off?
There's a line between "big ego" and "delusion", and it appears that Wolfram has crossed it. Innovation requires big ego and positive attitude, but it also requires some contact with reality, and the ability to appreciate with humility the achievements of others.
innovation, in your opinion requires those things.
I'll use musicians as an example because they're most fresh in my mind. Good grief, take a look at some of the people we all acknowledge as being innovators: Motzart, who said he wrote great music like cows pee -- it was just his thing. Beethoven, who used to play performances that would make people cry -- and then would yell at the crowd for being such naves. Berlioz -- "At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings."
Delusion is one of those things, especially with really smart people, that's easy to assume and hard to prove. Humility and all of that are wonderful social skills, but they are by no means a prerequisite for being a paradigm-changing person or leaving great innovations to society. The lack of them just makes one unpleasant, and I never said Wolfram was a pleasant person to be around.
And the kicker is -- their degree of popularity or acceptance by their peers in their own time was no indication of the contribution they eventually made. Their popularity and acceptance waxed and waned just like everyone else's: based on a bunch of social factors.
"Humility and all of that are wonderful social skills, but they are by no means a prerequisite for being a paradigm-changing person or leaving great innovations to society."
Social skills are paramount for all but solitary achievements. And great innovations are rarely paradigm-changing innovations.
An interesting contrast is Steve Jobs. Jobs is legendarily arrogant. But I would be surprised to see an outright self-protestation of his brilliance or greatness. Of Apple and Apple products, yes, but not Jobs praising Jobs. Instead, his great skill is flattering, motivating and persuading others. I do not think you can dispute that this has led to much paradigm-changing innovation.
Perhaps the problem is not that Wolfram is arrogant, but that he is so clumsily and self-apparently so. Wolfram has accomplished much, but it is possible he could achieve much more with a modicum of social skills.
I don't know Wolfram, and I doubt you do, so I can assume that perhaps he is clumsily arrogant. Makes sense to me.
I'm also not a math genius, and I doubt most of the folks on HN are either. I also lack the perspective of viewing Wolfram's works from a couple of hundred years out.
Given all of that, why would I want to hold Wolfram in any more disdain than the guy at the local softball game who thinks he was the best baseball player since Hank Aaron? If anything, such people are fun to be around -- at least until you've heard all of their stories. They certainly don't deserve mockery. If you've got a problem with how somebody treats you because they are arrogant, that's one thing. But if you're just out there tearing somebody else down because they're an easy target -- they're clumsily arrogant -- get a grip and start treating total strangers better.
I thought about mentioning Jobs. Goodness knows there are a lot of technology types that think they are God's gift to mankind as well. We just don't hear about them so much.
I think it's disturbing that we are all turning into hate-mongers: we define ourselves by who we mock and hate. Wolfram is cool to hate, so let's all pile on him. Bill Gates is the epitome of evil, so let's have at him too. It goes on and on.
These are human beings, precious other people. Would you want to be treated this way in a public forum by some writer looking to score points from his social group?
It's clanning at it's worst -- made out to be light and funny. Kind of like picking on the slow kid at school. Wolfram isn't any good at self-promoting! What a self-deluded idiot. I guess that's what struck me about the article.
I don't know one way or the other, but I know I'd rather talk about Wolfram's ideas than the man himself.
I don't know Wolfram either, but I have read reviews of A New Kind of Science by experts who are competent to judge, and they all say that the book is full of old ideas that Wolfram claims sole credit for. The only really impressive bit in it was a proof that was done by one of his research assistants. Wolfram sued the guy to keep him from publishing until the book came out. He's also sued other academics who have so much as dared to sniff around what he considers his territory. So, yeah, he's clumsily arrogant in ways that are especially odious to his academic peers, and he doesn't have the sort of ground breaking accomplishments that might incline people to overlook such things.
Is that a reason to hate the guy? No, I agree with you, don't be hatin'. It's unbecoming, and a waste of time. (Hecker's website is down, so I can't say if that's what he was doing.) If you really are defining yourself by who you hate, you are a pathetic individual who should be mocked yourself (but not hated). Wolfram is a brilliant, brilliant guy, and his company has written some pretty cool and impressive software, after all. What hast thou accomplished, O mocker?
But I don't believe in giving arrogant people the benefit of the doubt just because we don't have a couple hundred years of perspective on their ideas either. The number of people who warrant that kind of treatment can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and they were almost always overlooked because they were out of the mainstream and were not able to get anyone to pay attention to their ideas. Wolfram has had no problem getting people to pay attention to his ideas, and while they are not exactly mainstream, they are in some well known tributaries. They aren't misunderstood or ignored, just unsubstantiated, or not new, or wrong, for the most part. There's not necessarily any shame in that. Science is hard. But when you add a massive ego....
A certain amount of arrogance can be a useful thing and a lot of really smart people are also arrogant, but I would be very careful about using it as a sign of people who are likely to have good ideas, or who deserve any sort of deference. There are much better things to go by, and much worse things to mock.
A certain amount of arrogance can be a useful thing and a lot of really smart people are also arrogant, but I would be very careful about using it as a sign of people who are likely to have good ideas, or who deserve any sort of deference. There are much better things to go by, and much worse things to mock.
How about we leaving mocking people to other folks, then? Quite frankly I could care less if Wolfram gets along with his scientific peers, is a genius, is an idiot, is nice to strangers, or kicks his dog around at night. Let's just assume he is an intelligent person acting as best he can. If one of us gets to know him, and thinks he has some kind of personality problem, then by all means take him out and have a talk.
This is not giving people the benefit of the doubt. Even if Wolfram is all the bad things people are saying here, it doesn't matter. If you can't find it in your heart to give somebody the benefit of the doubt, just treat them decently. Even arrogant jerks can be treated with respect.
Am I missing something here? Because it sounding a lot to me like you're making the case "yeah, but he's a really bad jerk, and it isn't so bad to pick on those"
But that can't be right, can it? Because labels like "really bad jerk" can easily be stretched to fit lots of people.
I'm done here. I had no intention of defending Wolfram, only common sense. Perhaps tomorrow there will be some new really bad person that we can throw stones at. But we'll be sure first that they're really bad.
The people who care the most are people in fields adjacent to what Wolfram works on. They have an excellent reason to care: Wolfram has appropriated many things they've been saying far longer than he. Since their livelihood depends on their reputation for discovery, it's easy to see why they get annoyed and upset.
Criticizing people for all sorts of valid reasons and treating them decently are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to know someone personally in order to give a fair critique of their published ideas, or to know that the reason they sued you was stupid. Not everything is a personal attack (and you seem to take criticism of Wolfram more personally than he does. Note that this is an observation, and not intended as a personal attack on you!).
Again, I'm only defending the criticisms that I've read, which do not include Hecker's. They seem fair to me.
The problem is not "big ego", the problem is missing attribution and acknowledgment. You cannot walk around claiming you invented the wheel even if you came up more or less independently with the idea. More practically, you cannot with good conscience take someone else's data, put it in your DB, do a little sanity check, and then make everyone attribute the source to WA!
In all but a few situations (for example learning something completely new) being modest is simply a waste of time. I have come to believe that the effects of "overconfidence" are almost overwhelmingly positive. If I look at almost anyone I admire, I see that they have, and have probably had for a long time, a very high sense of their own worth. (For example, look at Paul Graham. Did it take audacity to say he was working on a "100 year language"?)
The reason why this took a long time for me to learn, is that being confident triggers an instinct in people to knock that person down and challenge them. See, for example, these comments. Nietzsche described this very well. It makes sense because there can only be a few leaders.
Personally, I'm trying to get back a sort of youthful impudence I used to have. It's a personality trait that is awakened when reading about how Wolfram, when he was a university student, in a debate, pointed to a stack of CS books including TAoCP and the Dragon book and said something like "I'm going to read these and then soon I will know all that you know". It's arrogant beyond belief but it also makes me think "fuck yeah". I think that part of me is far more valuable than the part that just wants to behave, be nice, and get upmodded in places like this for going along with a crowd and making sure that everything is said in veneered careful way that will be approved by elders in suits.
'It's arrogant beyond belief but it also makes me think "fuck yeah".'
Well put. I agree that the version of the story in which Wolfram quietly notices that he doesn't know facts, retreats to his room, and tries to learn something doesn't make me want to tear off my shirt and pound my chest NEARLY as much as the version in which he tells everyone he's better than they are before going to his room and trying to learn something.
The part of me that you mock, who wants to pound my chest and watch the Ultimate Fighting Championship and write abrasive comments on internet forums, I now realize is a gentle creature who needs nurture, and the direct source of much that I value.
I know that, but the question is if it can help? I don't think Wolfram is as significant as he thinks he is, but I think he's a lot more significant than a version without the obnoxious ego would be.
(1) You don't understand the distinction between having a big ego and being annoying. In this case I don't know what to say, except: thinking you're great doesn't necessitate telling everyone you're great.
(2) You do get the distinction, and you're really arguing that, big ego or small, immodesty is desirable. Again, there's not a lot to say here: it seems possible that Wolfram's success has a lot more to do with creating Mathematica than with telling people he's smarter than they are. If your position is really that being obnoxious (as opposed to merely having self-confidence) is useful, and that we should therefore be obnoxious, then so be it.
I totally disagree. Saying you are working on a 100 year language, ie being openly ambitiousis not the same thing as saying "I'm one of the most important scientists today. I'm really one of a kind." it seems silly to equate the two. And I don't think great scientists typically do that. They usually talk of standing on the shoulders of giants or being humble programmers.
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" quote is a bad example. It was a jibe at Hooke. From Michael White's biography of Newton:
"In the last sentence Newton revealed the truly spiteful, uncompromising and razor-sharp viciousness of his character, for Hooke [...] was so stooped and physically deformed that he had the appearance of a dwarf"
Where did I say that? Out of what dime novel did you learn about logic? Great scientists usually do talk of standing on the shoulders of giant and exhibit humility. Simply because I used a phrase that has been attributed to Newton does not mean that I am referring to or only to Newton or that I am naive about him.
If you want to debate me that all great scientists really do go around saying "Look at me I'm so great; I'm the most important working scientist of the age" then I would love to have that discussion. However, I doubt that is the case as you are simply presumptuous and want to make snide little comments because you some little factoid about Newton that, by the way, most readers of HN probably know this too. "Hah, you aren't special."
> If you want to debate me that all great scientists really do go around saying "Look at me I'm so great; I'm the most important working scientist of the age"
I really think most of the really great scientists have consistently _thought_ that to some degree. Some of them have been better or worse at internalizing, and had different degrees of political sensibility.
i think a lot of the discussion regarding this topic has focused too closely on famous scientists/innovators and whether they were insufferably arrogant or not. certainly we can all agree that many famous scientists were arrogant, and i believe your claim that many of the people you admire are arrogant. but these are the very rare people who are exceptionally talented and--i admit this with a sigh--deserve to be arrogant. it might be a little harder for me or others to get along with them, but that's who they are and if it helps them do good work, then so be it.
we seem to forget that the vast majority of arrogant people overestimate their abilities, are no better than their peers, and are mocked behind their backs or on the internet. One might term these the "fuck yeah" arrogants. Perhaps their arrogance is helping their work slightly, but I think instead its primary effect is to limit their capacity to learn.
Maybe overconfidence gives you a slightly higher likelihood of success. But I couldn't live with myself acting like that, and I wouldn't want the success that would come with it. I will settle for perhaps a slightly lower chance of success, but I'll feel better about it knowing I am being myself and treating others well.
> It makes sense because there can only be a few leaders.
Leaders are followed because they inspire, not because they're arrogant beyond believe. People that act like leaders but aren't are knocked down. The real leaders aren't.
I have come to believe that the effects of "overconfidence" are almost overwhelmingly positive. [..] I think that part of me is far more valuable than the part that just wants to behave, be nice, and get upmodded in places like this for going along with a crowd...
This is what you have been bred and socialized to think, as a male. (Yes, it does compete with some other, more modern forms of socialization.) Everyone who tries to knock you down is either building their own confidence or testing yours, or both. You are supposed to learn to use this to drive yourself more. Overconfident males who take risks are good for the social group and very good for the few males who become wildly successful, but not so great for the rest. But screw that, I'm a male, I know I'm smart, and I'm going to be one of the successful ones, dammit! Failure is not an option!
I'm a male, and I think I can accomplish anything I choose to do. That makes me ridiculously overconfident, which is probably necessary for accomplishing something new and important. I know about the odds, but I'm just not wired to care about them very much. My problem is that the prospect of great success doesn't really motivate me. This is not what males of the species are supposed to think, as much as evolved creatures are "supposed" to think anything at all. Some wires have gotten crossed somewhere. I am a mutant, and not the cool kind, like an X-Man.
Part of me already realizes that this defect will prevent me from fulfilling my role as a male, and reduces my chance of accomplishing something great from slim to almost nothing. I am a dud in the evolutionary scheme of things, not just a long shot, but a crippled long shot. The other part of me, the part that still works "properly," if there is a proper way for an evolved mechanism to work, believes that this is a problem that can be overcome. I can accomplish anything I want, after all.
The red light blinks, and the diagnostic routines whirr busily. The doll sits and waits patiently, confident that it will be able to carry out its programming. The confidence has been built into the doll, and it is almost as if the machine can sense the power of the deterministic forces that drive it. As if, in the stories its highly evolved brain carefully assembles from its memory banks, it could see the outlines of its future, astride the summit. As if its missing leg, and the tens of thousands of other machines streaming past it, some of them already halfway up the mountain, were insignificant trifles.
The machine sits with serene confidence because it knows something that the other machines do not. It knows that it is different. It knows that it can succeed where others have failed. It knows that when the diagnostic routines have finished and the problem has been resolved, it will be able to surpass all the machines that have moved ahead. It knows that it is overconfident, but it also knows that overconfidence is part of why it will succeed. It knows that it is following a story its brain has been programmed to tell, but it also knows that it is a story following machine, and that the story is also a necessary part of its eventual success. These things it knows.
I'm pretty certain that the author was making the subtle suggestion that Gödel would delight in concocting questions that would confound Wolframs' Alpha.
Fans of Stanislaw Lem might look at it this way...
("Have it compose a poem about a haircut. But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!")
Just a guess here, but maybe the author thinks that Kurt Gödel actually "...is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today."?
Then again, I don't even understand what the term 'technical computing' means.
I also completely miss the connection and I clearly wouldn't put those two in the same league. Godel was a very thoughtful if troubled soul who totally shook the foundations of mathematics.
No, that would require a modicum of modesty. I think Mr Wolfram compared himself somewhere in writing to Newton himself, but I cannot recall where I read that.
Some of Kurt Godel's most famous works are his 2 incompleteness theorems, which state the inherent limitations of all but the most trivial formal systems for arithmetic of mathematical interest.
Which basically means that there are things that just can't be computed but are quite obvious for us humans.
Firstly, the incompleteness theorem (there's only one) is not about computation but about proofs; specifically that there are some things within an axiomatic system which are true which cannot be proven such within the system itself.
Secondly, this does not mean that these things are unprovable, period. For instance, Gödel showed that you can prove these things perfectly fine, you just have to use different system. But this system will have its own unprovable statements.
Thirdly, computability was Turing's domain, not Gödels, and has to do with the kinds of algorithms you can use to perform proofs, not the system the proof is for. For example: second-order logic (SOL) can prove things about first-order logic (FOL) that FOL cannot prove about itself, but both systems can by utilized by a universal turing machine.
Fourthly, there is no known thing that cannot be proven, period, which is obvious for us humans.
There are two things called his incompleteness theorems, but only one actually deals with completeness. The other deals with consistency, which is not coming up with contradictory answers. Basically, it says that any system that asserts it is consistent is necessarily inconsistent. This is I suppose related to things which are true about the system which cannot be proven true in the system, but only in a roundabout way.
Computability and completeness are also definitely related, but, not quite so tightly as you implied. Computability is a property of algorithms, while completeness is a property of axiomatic systems. Algorithms operate on axiomatic systems, but are not the systems they implement, and there's no inherent connection between being able to prove statements about a system, and the algorithms used to compute proofs for that system. As I said, SOL can prove FOL to be complete and consistent, and you can do this on a universal turing machine, but FOL cannot prove itself to be complete and consistent even doing this on a universal turing machine.
Of course, if your computer _is_ an axiomatic system (and all are), then the incompleteness theorem(s) do say things about what that computer can do, and we know that all turing complete computers have precisely the same sorts of constraints in that regard.
The real thing that was irksome, tho, was the assertion that there are some things that are obvious to humans but which are uncomputable. This is just unfounded. Unless you're supposing human brains are somehow not computing things (collections of neurons are computers, after all, just not von Neumann architecture), there is no way for this statement to be true.
It's because of the self-referential, contradictory nature of Wolfram Alpha's answer. Kind of like trying to assign a truth value to the statement "this statement is false".
By putting in "how to program", and having it misinterpret it as "What is the world's most powerful computational software?", having the answer come out as "Wolfram Mathematica", and having the whole thing be powered by Wolfram Mathematica, you get a contradiction (maybe even 2)... in Gödelian style.
Not only that. Wolfram's attempt to take Godel's place in mathematics is contradicted by this answer, which is a self referential demonstration that the Wolfram axiomatic system (both the person and Alpha) cannot produce the genius of Godel, and is thus incomplete. Thus, Wolfram merely proves Godel's genius, via the original form of Godel's genius in the first place.
Basically, Wolfram is ingenious at proving his disingenuity.
Because Alpha's praise of Mathematica and Wolfie is like a rear world example of the incompleteness theorem? The limits of errr... I'm stretching this as far as I can, but it's not enough.
Such a huge ego, and I see that Wolfram is still at Alpha. Shouldn't we at least wait for WolframBeta ? Maybe he will have been able to iron out these ego discrepancies by then. ;)
I really don't understand the purpose of this article. Sure, Wolfram has a super huge (and possibly fragile) ego...does that in some way make the author feel less secure such that he has to invest time in trying to convince the world that Wolfram "ain't all that"?
I really feel compelled to point this out because as of now, this headline is #2.
This comment has a certain irony to it... do you feel "compelled to point this out" because the article "in some way make[s you] feel less secure such that [you have] to invest time in trying to convince the world that [the article] "ain't all that"?" Or why don't you just ignore it if it is so off?
and there you have it...the redditization of HN...
edit: I should add that yes, this article does make me feel less secure about the quality of articles making it to the top of HN (hence the very last statement in the original comment).
Fair enough. but then you should push for HN letting us downvote articles too, not only comments. I don't know how much impact one comment will have on whether an article (or class of articles) makes the frontpage. And by the way, please don't be prissy, I was just making a little fun.
I don't particularly care about advanced maths and don't have any interesting questions to ask when faced with Alpha.
It's getting mentioned all the time. I've now seen may mentions of ways that it fails. Is there anything that it is actually notably good at? People are obviously excited enough to be giving grief - is there a type of problem at which it is strong in a way that hasn't yet been done on the web?
It's quite cool to be able to type in 'sin 5' and the like but google does that already.
I can't think of much to use Alpha for yet either, but I think it represents a significant accomplishment nevertheless, in a frontiers of knowledge representation/interaction sort of way. Doug Lenat describes it as halfway between Google and his Cyc project on the generality <-> sophistication spectrum (see link), which is a fairly impressive accomplishment (it can do a lot more than just 'sin 5'). It may not end up being much more useful than Cyc is at the moment, but it's still an advance. This stuff will get better, but we still have to go through the intermediate steps.
The most perplexing thing for me is that Stephen Wolfram's kind of hyperbolic self promotion is something I normally see coming from companies that are trying to mask their lack of success. I actually think that Mathematica is an interesting and educational tool to use. Too bad it is a failure at affordability. Wolfram Alpha is not much to boast about in my opinion, but certainly an "answer engine" is a great goal and I would love to see more innovation here.
this is an amusing article that points out some of the more classic examples of wolfram's risible self-promotion. it's odd, however, that this critique comes from someone whose own webpage offers 3 headshots of himself, including one at the astronomic resolution of 1650x2135. (http://chrishecker.com/Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png)
Unlike Wolfram, Gödel did groundbreaking work. Gödel was revolutionary. Wolfram is quite smart, but other than Mathematica, I don't really think he has achieved much at all. Any comparison between the two men is ridiculous. They are in entirely different leagues.
That's it?
Nothing wrong with a big ego, is there? Self-promotion is still okay in the world? We're still free to toot our own horn? Write our own resumes, pitch our own products, spin our own political ideas, sell our own worldviews?
And what, exactly, does Godel have to do with any of that? I take it the idea is that Godel was the real genius?
If we're going to be measuring who's really smart, maybe we'd want to wait a few hundred years.
I admire people with big egos and positive attitudes. We could use more of them in the world. I don't buy into their self-image, but I admire it. Positive mental attitude -- the idea that you're capable of making something really big -- is what's going to keep you hacking on that startup long after others would have quit. Arrogance, on the other hand, is a different matter. But this post had nothing to say about arrogance.
Just wondering how it got so many upvotes. I guess Wolfram must have a natural ability to tick people off?